Still Standing, Walking the Mile

I am in the back seat of our car with our children. We are driving to the next town over to pay a traffic ticket, just one of those mundane errands. It's spring, so outside is wonderfully green and full, a deletion of the ugly winter grey. My mind is completely immersed and dissolved in the scene that I forget I am seated in a moving car. I suddenly spot this huge old tree standing just at the edge of the green landscape. If you look closely, you probably won't pay much attention to it. It's just a tree. However the way it stood there made me start to think about how old it was, its quiet existence, what it had survived and what it would say if it could speak. What wisdom did it hold? What was here before the road we were now using?

I think about how it could have been here all that time, without the ability to wake up one day and choose to leave. I think about all the seasons it had endured, especially the hot summers and the cold winters that must have felt never ending. I thought about the road we were using, the buildings and the electric poles around it that it probably saw being erected. Did it have an opinion on them? How about the people who once stood under it and are probably now dead? Did it exist during the politics that happened beyond its sight but changed the world it was in? The tree must have been quite brave, honestly, to have stood there watching all of this and having nothing to offer but itself.

I have read a lot of history books but I think this tree would tell me history in a way no textbook would. I would like to imagine it would tell me about the light quality on a particular May fifty years ago and the silence of the field surrounding it before the road came along with its noise.

I wonder what's beyond what my eyes can see. How about its roots? Do they reach out in every direction, touching the roots of everything around it? Is there a whole conversation happening underground that the people driving by would never know about? I don't think I would ever know, because I don't understand the language of the tree.

We drive past it and then I look back and wonder why I was thinking about the tree.

I think the tree carried something familiar that I have been feeling for a while now. Age. I feel like I just woke up and realized that I am no longer a child watching the adults in the room and I am now the adult. I am now being observed and doing the quiet work that no one thinks to acknowledge because it's expected, as it's naturally occurring.

Come to think of it, I know someone exactly like that. She didn't have a lot of things and yet she gave what she had just like that tree, by simply being there. I thought her love was something that naturally existed like air. I didn't understand that the act of just standing still and giving shade is labor. Beneath the tree are the roots that are doing intense work that no one sees or appreciates. The fact that the tree was simply there should be acknowledged as a wonder. Magic, to say the least.

She used to bring me food in my bedroom because I didn't want to sit in the living room. I would eat and when I was done, sleep, and not even once did I turn around to ask if she had eaten. I didn't think to. She was my mum. Mums are just, you know, mums. You don't ask a tree what it costs to stand.

When my mum used to make arrowroot, she would always give me the soft parts because she knew I liked those. In all that time I never noticed. I just ate what was given and assumed it was the natural order of things. That the best parts were reserved for me because I was there to receive them, as it's my right. I don't know what or when she ate, or whether she ate at all. It never crossed my mind and it didn't bother me at all.

Now I am the last to eat. My children eat first and it doesn't feel like a sacrifice. It's literally impossible for me to eat first because it simply feels immoral to do so. Something in me has been rearranged so completely that her instinct is now my instinct, her choices are now my nature and I didn't even see when it all happened.

I remember one day I told her almost boastfully that I would never be like her and she just kept quiet. When I look back now I think she was quiet because she had lived the same story, knew the ending and did not want to hand me the spoilers. She was just like that tree, sitting there with so much wisdom within her, knowing she had seen the exact same scene go down. I think in her head she weighed the option of telling me and decided not to because she understood that I would never understand her actions and nature until the day I walked a mile in her shoes. She was right.

I am now walking the mile, not just in this one scenario, but in many of my life's and parenting decisions.

I am so sorry I didn't see her sooner. And I am sorry that it took me miles to finally understand.